Tag: Opendoor

iBuyer News

Opendoor Enters Lending Business with Opendoor Home Loans

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opendoor

From staff reports

A few months after Zillow announced it would enter the lending business, iBuyer Opendoor announced Thursday that it would as well, launching Opendoor Home Loans.

In a statement released Thursday, the company said it was aiming to make the home lending process less complicated. It can take around 45 days to finance and close on a new home purchase, and the company saw an opening to streamline the process by encapsulating the buying experience from beginning to end.

“Having helped over 50,000 customers buy or sell with Opendoor and hosted over 1 million on demand self-tours of Opendoor homes, we know our customers value flexibility, simplicity and speed,” the company’s press release said. “We’ve taken those same principles and applied it to the home loan process.” (more…)
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Real Estate trends

What Turns Off DFW Homebuyers Could Be Costing You Thousands

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homebuyersSo you are mulling over putting your home on the market, but you know it could use some updating. What do you spend your money on, and what can you hold off on? Turns out, some things that homebuyers find turn them off can cost you thousands, so making good choices can make the difference in how much you end up getting for your home.

It’s also important to know what is trending style-wise, too. For instance, furniture maker Joybird found that when it comes to interior design, the top three searches in Texas were vintage, industrial, and rustic.

Joybird

What else do homebuyers want? Laundry rooms, energy-saving features, and more green home certifications, according to the National Association of Home Builder’s “What Home Buyers Really Want” survey. Homebuyers also wanted more storage, hardwood flooring, patios, and exterior lighting.

In Dallas, Opendoor crunched the numbers and found exactly what is turning area homebuyers off — call it a road map of sorts on pre-gaming that decision to list. 

(more…)
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iBuyer News

Opendoor to Launch All-In-One Buyer Service in Three Markets, DFW Included

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Courtesy Opendoor

Opendoor has made no secret that it wants to dominate the entire real estate industry. In fact, just last month founder Eric Wu told Inc. that he believes the five-year-old company will “build the largest marketplace of homes.”

And while the company is on pace to purchase $5 billion in homes this year, other companies are joining the fray — even the more “traditional” brokerages like Keller Williams offer it in select cities (including Dallas), and even locally, JP & Associates announced the launch of an iBuyer program for its agents this year.

The iBuyer may represent barely a percentage of the overall real estate ecosystem currently, but it’s clear that it’s disruptive enough to spur even bigger outfits like Realogy’s Coldwell Banker into getting their feet wet. 

But Wu told Inc. he had a plan, and it seems that as of 8 a.m. this morning, the rest of the world knows part of it — a new, all-in-one buyer service, which enables prospective buyers in DFW to browse, tour, and buy any MLS-listed home on the market through Opendoor. 

“If we can vertically integrate the category, rebuild every component from the ground up, automate a lot of the steps, and make it one click to buy, sell, or trade,” he told Kevin J. Ryan, “we believe that we will build the largest marketplace of homes. We’ll have eliminated all the friction. That may take 10, 20, 30 years.” (more…)
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Real Estate trends

Want To Sell Your House in a Week? Live In a Hot Zip Code

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Illustration courtesy PxHere

From staff reports

If you want to sell your house in less than a week, you might want to live in the zip codes for Euless, Lancaster, Irving, or Balch Springs, new data from iBuying start-up OpenDoor revealed.

The hottest zip codes were gleaned from data from the first three months of 2019 and have given the real estate company a good indication of the areas they think will be most attractive to buyers this summer. (more…)
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What is With All of These iBuyers All of the Sudden? Matt Templeton of KW Urban Answers

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By Matthew Templeton
Managing Principal
KW Urban Dallas

Why is there so much movement in the iBuyer world?

First: What is an iBuyer?

An iBuyer is an institutional or business-based investor that uses automated valuation models (using data and algorithms to estimate value and trends over time) to make offers on properties in the market without actually having to have a huge workforce on the ground.

Who are these guys? Opendoor may be the one you’ve heard about the most. But also, Knock (a version of iBuying that gives you cash to buy the home you want before helping you sell yours), Offerpad, Coldwell Banker, Zillow Instant Offers (opened in Dallas on April 15), and coming in May to Texas, Keller Williams, according to Inman News this week.

How is this different than a traditional investor? In some ways, it’s not — individuals with bandit signs that say things like “we buy houses for cash” and companies like HomeVestors (“We Buy Ugly Houses”) with billboards have been models for decades.  

What’s different is that these institutional investors can buy properties at scale and their hope is to make money on the volume acquisition.  They claim to be purchasing at higher prices than a traditional investor (seemingly providing convenience for a slightly lesser price than retail).  The marketing pitch is slick. The idea behind it seems amazing — except that homes are not just data points. The fallout is yet to be determined.

(more…)
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Real estate market news

Sixteen Dallas Neighborhood Projects Receive City Funding

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Everglade Park will be home to one community project to receive funding from the Dallas Neighborhood Vitality Grant Program (photo courtesy City of Dallas).

Which Dallas neighborhoods will receive grant dollars for community projects? What is holding many back from becoming homeowners in Dallas? We’ll look at that, plus see news on Opendoor’s newest round of funding and how it impacts North Texas in this week’s roundup of real estate news.

Sixteen Dallas Neighborhood Projects Receive City Funding

Sixteen projects across Dallas will receive Dallas Neighborhood Vitality Grant Program dollars this year to implement community improvements. (more…)
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Disruption!

The Profit Age vs. The Digital Age: A Reckoning For Real Estate

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Matt Templeton of Keller Williams Urban Dallas regularly educates Realtors on how to make the most of the current market. (Courtesy Photo)

By Matthew Templeton
Managing Principal
KW Urban Dallas

It feels like there have been fundamental shifts in the real estate industry within the last few months. Technology is the buzz word, money is being thrown around, and CEOs of just about every top real estate-related company are out. The last few weeks’ news sums up that feeling.

September 2018: Compass closes another funding round for $400 million — money used to build more software and buy more agents.

And then …

February: Rich Barton (billionaire co-founder of Expedia and Zillow) takes the reins from Spencer Rascoff, who was CEO at Zillow for nine years.

February: Keller Williams rolls out the first artificial intelligence and data-driven platform in the real estate industry — others have been clamoring to follow

February: RE/MAX says [sic] “Our amazing technology is coming, and it will be best in class,” and makes a technology acquisition, Booj.

Last Week: Data-driven Opendoor will now show listings from rival brokerages and offer Redfin-like rebates.

Last Week: NTREIS Board holds a vote on whether to sell greater data access to Zillow. April will be a reckoning month for North Texas Realtors and their data.

We’ve moved into a new real estate era that is faster paced and increasingly powered by technology and data — more than ever before. But there’s something else afoot. It’s eerily similar to what happened with the dot-com bust. Real estate technology companies are flush with capital — in fact, 2018 was a banner year for real estate technology investment.

And yet many of the top “technology” or “platform” companies in the industry are not profitable.

(more…)
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CandysDirt Open Houses of the Week

Three Homes to Fall In Love With, All With Open Houses

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loveAs we’ve mentioned before, every week we solicit pitches for our various featured listing posts, including our weekly roundup of open houses – and we love what you send us.

You can tag us on Instagram, or even better, you can join our Facebook group, Getting the Dirt.  It’s a great place to virtually mingle with fellow professionals, ask questions, lend a hand, and, yes, pitch stories to CandysDirt.com writers. Not a Realtor? It’s a great place to get a first glimpse at some of the most recent listings all over North Texas, too.

Take, for instance, this week’s properties featured in our CandysDirt.com Open Houses of the Week. We have three incredible properties this week — and one of them has even taken pains to help you out with your Valentine’s Day needs.

Want to see who made a successful pitch? (more…)
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